A Childs War

by Richard Ballard

  “Let it be true, what she said. That would be the best possible Christmas box.” He felt a little better then and came downstairs.

  His father and mother were in the kitchen, sitting at the table, in front of a cake made from hoarded ingredients. They were eating large slices with enjoyment and praising Edna for having made it so well. She looked up with a puzzled expression on her face and then smiled at George in such a way as to let him know that the speech had been made to her too. Moreover she had been able, after all these years, to accept it as genuine. He cut himself a large slice of cake.

  “I see you haven’t lost your appetite for good things,” said his father, and all four laughed. Alex, in his room upstairs, heard them and was glad they were enjoying themselves.

  Later, when George came back to Edna in the bedroom after putting a pillowcase with his presents in it for Alex at the bottom of his bed, she confirmed that George’s mother had said the same to both of them.

  “Let’s hope it lasts,” said George, as his teeth plopped into their nightly glass of water.

  “I don’t know whether it will or whether it won’t. You can’t suddenly start trusting someone who has not lifted a finger in friendship to you for all these years. I think I trust your father, but your mother still sets my teeth on edge.”

  “Even those teeth?” George laughed, pointing at the glass on the tallboy.

  “Anyway,” concluded Edna, “It’s Christmas tomorrow and we’ll take what they’ve said at face value for the present.”

  “Happy Christmas, girl,” said George.

  “We’ll see.”

  IX

  This year, George had spent a little more time than usual in secret in his shed making Alex a bus conductor’s ticket machine, complete with a punch for the cardboard tickets he had made, and with a bell that rang very realistically. The tickets were supplied in an appropriate wooden holder. He had put what he called “tiddly work” on the front of the ticket machine around the letters that stood for Oxford City Omnibus Company. Alex was very pleased and went to play with it behind the front room settee on which his grandparents were sitting.

  George’s father offered a parcel about eight inches long to Edna:

  “From both of us, with love,” he said.

  She took it diffidently. Previously she had been accustomed to receiving purely useful presents from them. George looked up from observing Alex making imaginative use of his gift, and met Edna’s eye. “Go on, see what it is,” he mouthed at her while his parents were looking at her, waiting for her to do so.

  She removed the wrapping paper to find a box with a jeweller’s name on the lid and inside was a most elegant wristwatch made of silver with a thin leather strap.

  “What a lovely watch,” she said, and put it on, seeing as she did so the hallmarks on the silver. She stood up and embraced them both in a way she had never felt able to before and found her feelings reciprocated. George’s father broke the silence this time.

  “I’m glad you like it, my dear,” something she had never been called by him before.

  Alex was puzzled to hear that it had all gone quiet in the street outside the bus he had created in his mind and looked over the settee to see that all four were standing there with their arms round each other. He came and asked them for their fares and gave them their tickets.

  The rest of Christmas day was spent happily. George and his father and Alex went for a walk, leaving Edna and her mother-inlaw in the kitchen to see to the Christmas dinner, for which resources had been to some extent pooled, hence the weight of one of their cases. They went along the road to the school so that Alex could show his grandfather where he spent some of his days and the walk ended by coming in the back way so that George could briefly point out the architectural delights of the Victorian dairy. His father said they put him in mind of the old detention barracks, though the brick here was red, not London grey. Alex told him about the crazed bullock in the garden after they came through the gate and his grandfather said,

  “Good Lord! Weren’t you frightened?”

  “Only a bit,” he replied, and preened himself.

  “I was, for certain,” said his smiling father as they reached the door, but what he was smiling about was what he had seen though the steam on the kitchen window: his mother and his wife with glasses of port and lemon in their hands, talking to each other as though there had never been any tension between them. When their coats had been hung up on the hall stand in the front passage, a whisky bottle was produced for George and his father. Alex was allowed a smell of the whisky and a sip of the port, and then given a glass of fizzy lemonade. Three bottles would make a case heavy enough, but there had been six.

  When evening came, they were in the front room again, with a warm fire and the blackout firmly in place. Alex realized that he could not spin out this happy day for very much longer and asked for a story.

  “Grandad will tell you a story.”

  “No, George, you’ve heard all my yarns many times over.”

  “You tell one then, Dad.”

  “I don’t know any. I only read them out of books, don’t I?”

  At school, Alex was fed on a diet of short poems by his new teacher since September and he asked,

  “Do you know any poems, then?”

  George replied with a little verse he thought suitable:

  A flea and a fly, in a flue,

  Were imprisoned,

  So what could they do?

  Said the flea, ‘Let us fly,’

  Said the fly, ‘Let us flee,’

  So they flew through a flaw in the flue.”

  They all applauded, and the laughter broke out.

  “But what about one of your yarns, Dad?” said George.

  “I can’t remember much, nowadays,” said the elderly man. “My plan to write them all down for you to read was foiled by that bloke who bombed your house.”

  “Yes. That was one of our saddest losses,” put in Edna obsequiously on her part. “Is there any chance you could do it again for us, and for Alex, who hasn’t heard them since he was a baby.”

  “No, dear. They’re all gone now. I can remember bits and pieces, like when the two ships went round Cape Horn in a surprising calm and the ships’ companies took turns to sing songs to each other.”

  “I wonder what the words were?” laughed George’s mother, as she always did.

  His father gave his well-rehearsed reply,

  “They were perfectly respectable songs, Gilbert and Sullivan, bits from Chu Chin Chow and things like that. Nothing offensive at all, I assure you.”

  Then he remembered events from his time as a diver and underwater sights in harbour as he had un-fouled propellers and inspected hulls for damage. His family settled to listen to him. The adults had heard all his reminiscences before. They had temporarily overcome tension on previous occasions and now that the hostility had apparently been cancelled, and its cancellation accepted, the yarns he spun took on the nature of family cement.

  Alex would always recount to his own friends in later years the tale George told him of his grandfather’s time in a “down funnel up screw boat” that spent years protecting fishermen off Newfoundland at the time of Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee, during which time he had become the youngest Chief Stoker in the navy by virtue of his fists. But this Christmas night the old man was in no mood to boast, just to reminisce in the presence of part of his family where he had not hitherto felt at peace.

  X

  Boxing Day passed happily also. In the evening the air raid warning sounded, and George and Edna went all over the house seeing that the blackout was in place properly. There had not been many alarms of this kind lately and Oxford’s reputation as a safe place had been preserved. Nevertheless, no one took any chances and all the occupants of the house waited with some concern until after about half an hour the all-clear sounded. George’s father got out of the big armchair he had occupied and went out of the room. They heard him open the
front door and go outside. Conversation began again without him and after a few minutes he came back in. He was pensive and only said one more thing in Alex’s hearing that evening: “It’s as quiet as the grave out there.”

  The old couple left the day after to go to see their daughter, George’s sister, ten years his junior, who was working in an Admiralty office in Bath. Then they would go home for the New Year, where another daughter-in-law lived round the corner whose husband, George’s brother, spent most of the war in Ceylon (as they called it then) working on dockyard installations.

  Alex very much enjoyed his grandparents’ Christmas present to him. It was Stephenson’s “Treasure Island” and he could read it for himself, enjoying the full-page paintings that illustrated it. He still persuaded George to read bits of it to him, however, especially the chapter called “Heard in the Apple Barrel”, which he delivered very entertainingly indeed with all the different voices.

  In mid-January, George was on his way to work, when Edna called him back. A telegram had been brought and the boy waited for a reply. Edna watched while George opened it in the kitchen, then suddenly sat down and held the paper out for her to read. It said, with brutal simplicity,

  “Dad died of a heart attack this morning. Please come. Mum.”

  So George, not wanting to shed tears till he had made arrangements, went to the dairy and told his assistant he would be away to bury his father and called the dairy’s manager, who was still at home, on the telephone to tell him the same. Then he came back in order to change his clothes. While he was upstairs, Alex came down to the kitchen. It fell to Edna therefore to explain to him what had happened.

  “So he won’t be able to come and see us again,” he said.

  “That’s right,” Edna replied.

  Edna made George a packet of sandwiches, because it had been before breakfast when the news came and as she gave them to him she said quietly,

  “I see now why he made his peace with us.”

  George saw, too, and then he did weep. Alex thought he ought to as well, but only cried because George was unhappy. He had not been able to know his grandfather very well. He felt his father patting him on the head as he left for the coach station.

  When George had gone, Edna did something unusual: she sat down in the kitchen and pulled Alex on her knee to cuddle him until she saw that it was twenty past eight and he had not had his porridge before he went to school. She felt sorry for Alex as well as herself. She had just begun to be able to like her father-in-law and he had been taken away. Alex had no grandfather at all now, since her father had died on his own after having estranged himself from all three of his daughters in his bereaved alcoholic loneliness eight years ago. Edna wept for universal misery, which had only a small connection with David Ryland’s passing.

  7

  When George came back from his father’s funeral, he was in a good deal of discomfort from his hernia. Other people would have called it pain. The Scottish doctor lectured him for having neglected it for all these years and told him that the truss he wore was worn out in any case. She strongly advised him to have the condition dealt with by surgery at the Radcliffe Infirmary:

  “You’ll not get better treatment, Mr Ryland.”

  George gave in and agreed to see the specialist there with a view to going into hospital as soon as possible. The powers at the dairy consented to him having sick leave at short notice when the opportunity arose. He was also advised by them not to refuse any chance to have it done quickly. If the European invasion began, as it might at any time, hospital beds all over the country would be at a premium. This was a common sense argument George had no reply to - and Edna in all her waking moments with him would not hear of him ducking the issue any longer.

  “Who wants to go to bed with an old man who wears a truss?” was her own particular clincher, which left George wondering why she had not complained before about what he had been offering during the last fourteen years. All he said was, “I don’t usually keep it on, do I?”

  When they became aware that Alex had heard this exchange, they became embarrassed. He carried on drawing and only wondered briefly in passing why she should think that George needed his truss while he was asleep.

  On January the twenty-fifth the letter came, offering him a bed in two days’ time. So Edna ironed his most recently acquired pyjamas, leaving him the torn ones to wear for the following nights before he went, and he steeled himself for what he had been dreading all this time: an anaesthetic. It was his secret fear - and he had not owned up to it.

  Edna took Alex to see him in hospital. He spent his time in a pre-occupied way during his family’s visit. He had pieces of string with him and, sitting up in bed, demonstrated reef knots and bowlines and how to manufacture them to Alex as he joined them all together. Edna became exasperated and asked Alex to wait in the garden despite the fact that it was cold out there.

  “I just want to talk seriously to Dad and then when I come out we’ll go home.”

  So Alex hugged his father and told him to get well soon and did as he was told. No tortoise, no tabby cat. Evening frost on the only seat. Goose pimples on the knees - and then a purposeful Edna, out in a very short time.

  “Come on, Alex. Sometimes I think your father is a blithering idiot!”

  “He makes me laugh too,” replied Alex, not really knowing what “blithering” might mean and misguidedly thinking idiots were funny.

  When he came home from school next day, on his own as far as the shop and then with the guidance across the road of a lady who came out of it, there was George in the living room by the fire, in his pyjamas and big brown dressing gown.

  “How did you get here?” asked Alex.

  “I discharged myself,” was the reply.

  Alex went quickly to the kitchen where Edna was making tea for George.

  “When did he go off bang?” Alex asked.

  ”It wasn’t him who exploded. It was me, when he came home in a taxi half an hour ago refusing to have the operation after all and leaving the hospital with his clothes under his arm in a parcel done up with that bloody string he was playing with last night!”

  “What’s he going to do then?”

  “He says he’s going back to work tomorrow. He may find people there with other ideas about his future. Then where shall we be?”

  II

  The dairy management did have other ideas about George’s future. They said they could not accept the risk of a man who was not in reasonable health working in a responsible post at the dairy. He had oversight of the sterilizing plant, to say the least, and if he suddenly had to leave the building and the machinery broke down, production would have to stop. His deputy could cope now and again, but the ultimate responsibility was his, they said. So, reluctantly they must let him go while thanking him for the excellent work he had done since he had been with them.

  When he asked about the tied house, they said that since he had nowhere else to go, and had lost his only capital asset in the blitz, they would let him stay on in it for the time being. They would try to appoint a new engineer who had his own home and would not need the house. George would be required to pay what they called an economic rent. All this was said on the understanding that if they found that they did need the house he would have to vacate it. George accepted the terms and applied for a desk job a few miles away at Wheatley that he had seen advertised in the Oxford Mail, for an Engineering Supervisor of the plant being established in an American army hospital. That would mean a daily return bus ride, but the pay offered was good and he would be able to afford rather more than the economic rent on 56 Botley Road. Life looked as though it might get better if he got the job. Moreover, he would be glad to wear clean clothes at work and he hoped his days of grimy overalls were all over. He claimed that the new truss he acquired a week later worked wonders. He felt better than he had done for a long time.

  As to Edna going to bed with George, one weekend there was to be a fun fair in the rec. Alex
and a few other boys he knew from school, with Edna’s knowledge, had gone down there to help put the fair up. This meant they were allowed a few free goes on the rides and the stalls. Alex won a Jacobean tumbler, as was said. He ran home all the way along Henry Road to show it to his parents and found them in their bed together in broad daylight. The main proceedings had finished and he heard them talking as he went up the stairs. They explained to him that they were both feeling tired and had taken the opportunity for a well-earned rest. He wondered why they had taken their clothes off to do that, as it was obvious that they had when they sat up to admire the heirloom he had won for them. But the thought of winning something else made him rush away and not give the matter a further thought.

  Legitimate punters were now arriving at the fair and the stallholders and men on the rides did not need further assistance from juvenile volunteers. He and the other boys were paid sixpence each and realized that was the end of their period of employment. By the time Alex was home again, normal clothing had been resumed appropriate to a February day.

  III

  Alex found on Wednesday during the following week that tea was ready in the kitchen, but George and Edna were not in there to eat it as soon as George came home from work as was their usual practice. They were sitting at the living room table instead which bore no more than its usual diagonal runner and cut-glass bowl: Edna was crying and George had his elbows on the table and his head in his hands. In front of them was an open letter.

  Alex came into the room quietly and sat down at the table with them. He did not know how to ask what was wrong. He could see that the letter was typewritten on paper that was printed at the top. He waited. Edna’s sobs subsided eventually and George put out a hand to touch her shoulder. Then, looking up at Alex, he said,